Japan a robot power everywhere except at nuclear plant

TOKYO, March 17 (Reuters) - Japan may build robots to play
the violin, run marathons and preside over weddings, but it has
not deployed any of the machines to help repair its crippled
reactors.

While robots are commonplace in the nuclear power industry,
with EU engineers building one that can climb walls through
radioactive fields, the electric power company running Japan's
Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has not deployed any for the nuclear
emergency.

Instead, its skeleton team has been given the unenviable and
perhaps deadly task of cooling reactors and spent nuclear fuel
on their own, only taking breaks to avoid over-exposure.

A science ministry official said a robot used to detect
radiation levels is at the site of the accident in Fukushima,
north of Tokyo, but nuclear safety agency official Hidehiko
Nishiyama said: "We have no reports of any robots being used."

That robot would have come in handy early on Thursday when
workers monitoring radiation had to back away from the plant
because it was becoming too hot.

While Japan is renowned for its cutting edge technology, it
also maintains an anachronistic element in its society that
relies on humans for tasks that have given way to automation in
many other parts of the world, such as operating elevators and
warning motorists of road construction.

In one of Japan's worst nuclear accidents, two workers were
killed in September 1999, when workers at a nuclear facility in
Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, set off an uncontrolled nuclear
chain reaction by using buckets to mix nuclear fuel in a lab.

Japan is a world leader in robots, using them to automate
the most complicated manufacturing processes and to sift through
rubble to look for victims in earthquakes.

Robots were also used after two infamous nuclear disasters
-- Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and will almost certainly be
used at Fukushima for work in highly radioactive areas.

Kim Seungho, a nuclear official who engineered robots for
South Korea's atomic power plants, said: "You have to design
emergency robots for plants when they are being built so they
can navigate corridors, steps and close valves."

The Fukushima plant was built in the 1970s, well before
robots were able to work on sophisticated tasks.

Robots are in place in many nuclear plants for structured
situations such as monitoring pipes and simple maintenance.

Kim, a deputy director in nuclear technology for the Korea
Atomic Energy Research Institute, said budget constraints and
denial have kept emergency robots out of many plants in his
country and around the world.

"Nuclear plant operators don't liked to think about serious
situations that are beyond human control," he said by telephone.
(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)